Amid Flood Cleanup in Spain, Residents Try to Make Sense of the Disaster

Some see the floods as an example of the effect of a changing climate that is making overwhelming downpours more common. Locals also say government warnings came too late.

Mari Luz Sánchez’s body lay on top of an overturned refrigerator in a corner of her kitchen when her family found her. A wave of water in the village of Chiva, in southeastern Spain, had deposited her there after devastating flooding across the region on Tuesday night.

“The torrent of water took her away,” said Ms. Sánchez’s daughter-in-law, Pilar Zahonero. “Nothing like this has ever happened before.”

Never had locals in Chiva seen their streets turn into such furious surges of muddy water that tore through their homes. Not in the 1983 floods, nor in the ones in 2019, had waves over six feet high trapped people inside their cars and homes and taken so many lives.

“I’d never seen rain like this,” said Concepción Feijoo Martínez, 66, as she stood in her house in Chiva, which had been torn open on one side by the rushing waters let loose when a nearby river overflowed its banks.

“They say there is no climate change,” she added. “Then what is this atrocity?”

Days after their country’s deadliest natural catastrophe in recent decades, as they swept mud off their floors and mourned their dead, Spaniards started to try to make sense of the tragedy that had struck them: Why were the floods on such an enormous scale, and why did so many die?

Some blamed awful luck, but others saw it as a glaring example of the effect of a changing climate that is making such overwhelming downpours more common. Still others pointed their fingers at their politicians, who sounded the alarm only after the flood was already raging, compounding the catastrophe.

“It was a mix of two things,” said Francesc Zamorano, 22, who left his house to go to work on Tuesday evening in the town of Sedaví, in Valencia Province, and found himself in the middle of the flood. “Obviously, it’s a catastrophe caused by climate change,” he added. “But if the government warned us earlier, everything would be different.”

On Saturday, the government announced that it would deploy 10,000 members of the police, military and civil guard to the disaster zone in Valencia, bolstering the thousands of officers already there to help with search and rescue and cleanup operations.

“It is the largest deployment of state security forces and bodies ever made in our country in times of peace,” Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said in a televised briefing.

The rains that hit the towns of east-central Spain, prompting rivers to escape their banks and killing more than 200 people, were an exceptional event. In Chiva, nearly 20 inches of rain fell in eight hours on Tuesday, Spain’s meteorological agency said. That is what the area normally receives in a year.

Rivers have overflowed before in this part of Spain, and it is difficult to estimate the influence of climate change on a single flooding disaster. But scientists said the volume and strength of this week’s floods were a grim harbinger of more extreme storms that the region can expect as fossil fuel emissions heat the planet.

Warmer air holds more moisture, increasing the likelihood of severe downpours. While the storms that caused this past week’s flooding are common in this region of Spain each fall, scientists said that global warming is helping them become more violent.

In what must seem a cruel twist to those affected by the flooding, Spain has recently experienced major droughts, too, which are also typical of the Mediterranean climate, but are getting more severe.

“What is happening with climate change is that extreme episodes combine,” said Francisco J. Tapiador, a professor of earth physics at University of Castilla-La Mancha.

In Chiva, Juan Jose Sánchez Conoves, 74, a farmer and a beekeeper, said that because of the droughts, his vines were shorter and less fruitful than usual this year, producing only two kilograms of grapes per vine (about 4.4 pounds) instead of six or seven, he said.

“We went from years of drought to savage rain,” he said. “I don’t understand.”

Spaniards understood that the floods were a mighty, unstoppable event, but many also said more could have been done to prevent them from becoming so deadly.

While Spain’s Weather Service had issued warnings about the coming storms, it took the regional government, which is in charge of managing emergencies, until 8 p.m. Tuesday to send out an emergency warning through an automated mass messaging system.

By that time, “water was already up to here,” said Francisco Talavera, 60, raising his arm above his head. His home in Chiva, covered in blue and white Azulejo ceramic tiles, now was blanketed in mud, with a huge crater in one of its rooms where the floor had collapsed.

If they had told people in time, “nobody would have died in their cars,” he said. “If the factories were closed, nobody would die in the factories.”

Josefa García Pastor, a spokeswoman for the regional government of Valencia, said that the public information available at the time did not indicate that the weather was going to be so devastating, and that in the previous days, the authorities had put out some messages on social media warning the population to be cautious because of a risk of flooding.

She said the conditions for sending out the mass alert (which include the magnitude of the threat and the possible consequences for public security) had not been met before it was transmitted.

Many Spaniards were not satisfied with that explanation.

“This was negligence,” said Isabel Vicente, adding that rivers of mud were already tearing through her street when she got the alert. “When they told us, we could not do anything anymore.”

When the conservative Popular Party came to power last year in Valencia, supported by the far-right Vox party, the new government disbanded an emergency unit that had been created by the previous socialist administration to accelerate the response to serious crises. Ms. García Pastor said that the former system had been useless.

A spokeswoman for Spain’s Socialist prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, said that “it is clear that any decision that involves reducing the number of troops and disaster response mechanisms can have, and has, very harmful consequences for society.”

Other Socialists criticized Carlos Mazón, the leader of the Valencia region, for teaming up with Vox, a party whose members have denied the existence of climate change, before finding himself confronted with a natural disaster caused at least in part by climate change.

Government officials and experts urged an overhaul of the region’s infrastructure and preparedness plans to be ready to respond to ever more violent weather.

“What happens in Valencia tells us that something is changing,” said Enric Juliana, a prominent Spanish political commentator. “That we need to be ready for a future that is going to be different.”

Some locals like Mr. Talavera, who doubts he will ever be able to live in his house again, said they were having trouble right now imagining a future at all.

“This has destroyed our life.”

José Bautista contributed reporting from Madrid, Roser Toll Pifarré from Barcelona and Lynsey Chutel from London.